Leonine verse


Leonine verse is a type of versification based on internal rhyme, and commonly used in Latin verse of the European Middle Ages. The invention of such conscious rhymes, foreign to Classical Latin poetry, is traditionally attributed to a probably apocryphal monk Leonius, who is supposed to be the author of a history of the Old Testament preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. This "history" is composed in Latin verses, all of which rhyme in the center. It is possible that this Leonius is the same person as Leoninus, a Benedictine musician of the twelfth century, in which case he would not have been the original inventor of the form. It is sometimes referred to disparagingly as "jangling verse" by classical purists, for example 19th century antiquaries, who consider it absurd and coarse and a corruption of and offensive to the high ideals of classical literature.
In English, the rhyme may be between a word within the line and the word at the end. Shakespeare used it to denote absurd characters, as in the speech of Caliban in The Tempest.

Examples

Latin

Another very famous poem in Leonine rhyme is the De Contemptu Mundi of Bernard of Cluny, whose first book begins:
As this example of tripartiti dactylici caudati shows, the internal rhymes of leonine verse may be based on tripartition of the line and do not necessarily involve the end of the line at all.
In 1893, the American composer Horatio Parker set the Hora novissima to music in his cantata of the same name.
The epitaph of Count Alan Rufus, dated by Richard Sharpe and others to 1093, is described by André Wilmart as being in Leonine hexameter.

English

A leonine rhyme is used by Edward Lear in his humorous poem "The Owl and the Pussy Cat":